The United States is currently experiencing the longest period of sustained declines in life expediency since the first decades of the 20th century when the First World War and Spanish Flu Pandemic took thousands of lives. According to Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Center For Disease Control (CDC):

“These sobering statistics are a wake-up call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable”.

2017 saw the highest number of deaths in the United States since such figures started being recorded while the overall trend of life expectancy decreasing has continued since 2015 first saw a reversal of decades long trends of life expectancy increasing among Americans. During this period, China eclipsed the United States in terms of life expectancy for the first time in history according to statistics tabulated in 2016. Commenting on the negative trends in the US, the CDC director further stated, “we’ve never really seen anything like this“.

Among the causes of death that have risen in the United States is suicide which in 2017 reached its highest level since at least 1975. One of the leading causes of suicide in the United States remains drug use (both legal and illegal drugs) with CDC researchers discovering that one tenth of intentional suicides are caused by drugs while over a third of unintentional suicides come from drug overdoses. In 2017 alone, over 70,000 Americans died from drug use while the drug epidemic in the United States shows few meaningful signs of slowing down. On the whole, drug related deaths were up by 9.6% in 2017 while the suicide rate increased by 3.7% over 2016. Since 1999, the suicide rate in the United States has increased by 33%.

CNBC further reports the following statistics:

“The rate of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone increased by 45 percent from the previous year. According to the CDC, fentanyl, one such synthetic opiate, is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine and often mixed with heroin or cocaine, sometimes without the user’s knowledge. Since 2013, the number of deaths from overdoses involving synthetic opioids have jumped sharply”.

The grim picture painted by these statistics clearly demonstrates that American authorities have largely lost control of both the illegal narcotics trade and the proliferation of legally sold drugs that are being abused for so-called recreational purposes. The statistics become all the more sobering when one realises that the sale of black market narcotics are a major source of revenue for terror organisations while the use of drugs in both international and domestic terror attacks remains breathtakingly substantial.

It has long been known that some of the deadliest mass shooting in the United States were carried out by individuals on drugs. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Stephen Paddock, the man responsible for the largest mass shooting in modern American history was in fact prescribed a potent narcotic before opening fire on concert attendees outside the Mandalay Bay Hotel. According to the report,

“Records from the Nevada Prescription Monitoring Program obtained Tuesday show Paddock was prescribed 50 10-milligram diazepam tablets by Henderson physician Dr. Steven Winkler on June 21. A woman who answered the phone at Winkler’s office would not make him available to answer questions and would neither confirm nor deny that Paddock was ever a patient. Paddock purchased the drug — its brand name is Valium — without insurance at a Walgreens store in Reno on the same day it was prescribed.

He was supposed to take one pill a day. Diazepam is a sedative-hypnotic drug in the class of drugs known as benzodizepines, which studies have shown can trigger aggressive behaviour. Chronic use or abuse of sedatives such as diazepam can also trigger psychotic experiences, according to drugabuse.com”.

Drug use among members of well known international terror groups is also highly alarming. While the PKK terror group has killed 40,000 people in less than forty years including Turkish military officers and police, civilians, tourists and the ethnic Kurds that the PKK falsely claims to represent, this statistic does not include the multitude of further deaths caused by the illegal inter-continental narcotics trade controlled by PKK terrorists. Turkey’s Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu has recently warned his European Union partners to be on guard against the PKK’s narco-network in Europe. According to Soylu,

“Especially in Europe, the PKK controls 80 percent of the drug trade and it is estimated that the terror group earns around $1.5 billion per year.

…In other words, [drug dealers] are continuously inventing new drugs. The production of drugs is also increasing. The area of opium cultivation in Afghanistan was 17,000 hectares in 2002. The U.S. intervened there to bring peace and democracy; it was such an intervention that the cultivation area jumped to 328,000 hectares in 2017. Opium production increased from 4,800 tons in 2016 to 9,000 tons in 2017, an increase of 63 percent in a year”.

The Interior Minister further detailed how Turkish authorities are stepping up their fight against narcotics, but cautioned that all nations much be vigilant against this threat. He further detailed the nature of the drugs trafficked and sold by the PKK including heroin, cocaine, meth, so-called “ecstasy” and most worryingly the notorious captagon – the drug of choice for Daesh an al-Qaeda terrorists. Soylu stated,

“If I tell you that we have captured 15,821,096 captagon pills from street dealers in the first 10 months, we can make a clear picture in the minds of the public regarding the scale of our fight on the field”.

To understand the importance of captagon to international terror networks in terms not only of selling the drug but in respect of distributing it among murderous terrorists, one must trace the origins of the drug’s popularity to recent wars throughout the Middle East and Africa.

In 2011, when Libyan Revolutionary leader Muammar Gaddafi appeared before his nation saying that seditious elements and foreign agitators were on narcotics and thus deprived of their own cognitive abilities, he was laughed at by the western mainstream media who cheered on his subsequent assassination at the hands of al-Qaeda proxies working with the US, UK and France.

It turns out that Gaddafi was absolutely correct. Drugs have become a staple of the modern terrorist’s diet. From Libya to Syria and Iraq to Philippines, warped young men without a real knowledge of any particular faith or ideology are taking vast amounts of drugs in order to give them the physical stamina combined with mental incapacity, which allows them to carry out barbaric atrocities without cessation. If it ever seemed odd that young men turn to terrorism which will often lead to their own death, as well as the death of others, without any promise of earthly remuneration, this is because even among the poor or the mentally challenged, terrorism is typically unthinkable.

It is the promise and delivery of mind altering drugs which pushes young people into terrorism, rather than mythical notions about an un-Islamic and un-Christian afterlife. In this sense, the difference between a young man turning to drug dealing or robbery, has the same basic origins as those who turn to terrorism. In most societies it is a slippery slope. It is no coincidence that many well known terrorists were fond of alcohol, prostitutes and so-called recreational drugs prior to committing their atrocities. While alcoholism, the taking of narcotics and the frequenting of harlots is prohibited in Islam, these actions are de rigueur in respect of the lifestyles that surround the narco-trade. Thus, terrorism is anything but a “problem with Islam”, it is a geopolitical problem whose foot-soldiers are fuelled by dangerous drugs.

While there are many drugs used by terrorists, well-known narcotics such as cocaine is at best, a second favourite among today’s killers. The 21st century terrorist’s drug of choice is a pill called captagon whose effects while similar to cocaine, are even more extreme, making its users capable of super-human violence while totally erasing what remains of a human conscience.

Captagon has been found among Daesh (ISIS) and al-Qaeda fighters in Libya, Iraq, Syria, as well as in terrorist shipping roots in France and Italy, just to name a few. But other drugs also play their role. Philippine President Duterte has waged a war against drug addicts, drug dealers and the criminal networks built up around both. These networks include not only mafioso gangs, but Daesh aligned terrorist organisations. Soldiers in The Philippines have discovered that the Daesh aligned Maute Group who for months occupied the city of Marawi in Mindanao, were taking the drug known as Shabu, a powerful methamphetamine which has been at the root of South East Asia’s drug problem.

Recently, it came to be known that the terrorists who slaughtered civilians last year on England’s London Bridge and surrounding areas, were on powerful steroids. But it is not just Daesh and al-Qaeda related terrorists who are fuelled by drugs. Most of the so-called mass shooters in recent US history, have been under the influence of narcotics both during and before their killing sprees. This includes Stephen Paddock, the man who committed the biggest mass shooting in US history last year in Las Vegas.

The plague of narcotics is directly related to terrorism at the point of sale, the point of cultivation and more often than not at the point of ingestion. The seriousness of the drug fuelled element of international terrorism however still remains silenced throughout Europe as does the PKK’s invasion of the European Union.

Whether international suicides, overdoses, lone wolf terrorist mass shootings or terrorist atrocities committed by members of well known terror groups, the proliferation of drugs is a menace to social stability and peace. While many US officials have criticised Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s unrelenting war on drugs, it turns out that in the United States, the drugs are winning the war and human life is the penultimate victim.

Duterte himself commented on the trends in the US that have now been backed up by official American government statistics. Speaking on the matter earlier this year, Duterte stated:

“Someday, remember this. One day to your horror [you will realise], your [drug] problem is 100 times more serious than what we have”.

Duterte’s words have now been vindicated by the tragic realities befalling the American public.